Race and racial bias

President Obama says that race relations have improved on his watch, which seems obviously untrue. 2014 will go down in history as the year when there was a racist under every bed. Grabien has assembled these clips from the past year, in which 39 things are claimed to be racist. It would be funny if the Democrats’ stirring up of racial conflict were not having tragic consequences: »

Like all presidents, and probably more than most, President Obama is concerned about his legacy. Obama devoutly hopes that the following sentence will not appear in history books: Although he was the first African-American elected president, race relations worsened during his time in office. It’s not that Obama hates the idea of race relations worsening during his time in office. The idea of “no justice, no peace” may well appeal »

I was surprised, to put it mildly, to hear Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke disparaging Mayor de Blasio and President Obama and Obma pal Al Sharpton last week when I happened to catch Clarke’s post-Christmas appearance live on cable news. It’s not that Sheriff Clarke hasn’t distinguished himself as a voice of truth and reason on matters of race and law enforcement. It’s that he was saying these things on »

Erin Burnett invited Rudy Giuliani to appear on CNN last week immediately following Giuliani’s visit to the grieving families of NYPD Officers Ramos and Liu. Breitbart posted the video below along with a transcript of the interview here. Burnett devoted the first question and perhaps 30 seconds to the murder of the two officers. After that she couldn’t wait to introduce yet one more statistic designed to create the impression »

Some 25,000 policemen turned out for the funeral of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos in Queens, some of them flown to New York, free of charge, by Jet Blue. This was the sea of blue outside the church where the funeral was held: Ramos’s family, before the service. I had not realized it, but Ramos reportedly was studying to be a minister: Mayor de Blasio has been trying to mend fences »

One of this morning’s big news stories is the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Antonio Martin by a policeman in Berkeley, Missouri–a place that, the Associated Press tells us helpfully, is “just a few miles from Ferguson.” The Antonio Martin shooting is currently the top story on Google News, and it is being headlined on pretty much every newspaper’s website. But why? What makes this a major news story? The Michael »

We are inundated with race hustling baloney from the top on down, from President Obama and Attorney General Holder to New York’s Comrade de Blasio (as Sean Hannity calls him) and MSNBC’s Power Dem Al Sharpton. Before the murders of the NYPD officers, when the protesters were riding high, de Blasio had soliloquized over the painful warnings he had given his mixed-race son Dante about the perils of a black »

This afternoon there was an anti-police demonstration at the Mall of America in Minnesota. Twitchy had coverage. Stores were closed as chanting protesters occupied portions of several floors overlooking the mall’s rotunda. This photo is from Twitter: The person who posted it added: “Prosecute the police! Multilevel chant is thrilling.” The mall warned protesters to disperse, and police eventually cleared them out: While the demonstration was in progress, another anti-police »

Pretty much everyone is all over this story, but what the heck: why not pile on? The Obamas are trying to catch the wave of racism that supposedly is sweeping across the land. They may live in the White House, but hey–they are still subjected to racial bias. No, they don’t mean getting preferential treatment when applying to colleges and law schools, or being taken seriously as a presidential candidate »

When students at Columbia and other law schools around the country demanded that exams be postponed because they were traumatized by the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, we and many others responded with ridicule. In today’s National Law Journal, a third-year law student at Harvard named William Desmond says that we got it all wrong: the request for extra time for exams was a sign of the students’ strength. »

The story that Paul broke about Columbia Law School postponing exams for students who purport to be traumatized by the grand jury proceedings in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases is percolating through the press. The New York Times, Columbia’s home town paper, reports: Columbia Law School is allowing students to postpone their final exams this month if they feel unnerved by the recent grand jury decisions not to »

C.J. (Cheryl Johnson) writes the gossip column for the Star Tribune, Newspaper of the Twin Cities. Her current column shows how hard it can be to come up with material in Minnesota, yet C.J. has kept it going at a brisk pace for lo, these many years. The Minnesota Monthly profiled C.J. in August 2007. The article is accessible online here. It affords a glimpse of her at work around »

Columbia Law School agreed to postpone exams for “traumatized” students in response to, in effect, a demand by “The Coalition of Affinity Group Student Leaders and Students of Color” at Columbia. Here is the full text of the Coalition’s statement: Dear Columbia Law School Faculty and Administrators, We are writing to you as students who have been deeply affected by the recent events in Ferguson, in New York, and across »

In his message to the Columbia Law School community, interim dean Robert Scott tells those “who would like support” in the wake of two recent grand jury “no-bills” that four professors have made themselves available for that purpose. The four are: Katherine Franke, Conrad Johnson, Olati Johnson, and Susan Sturm. Who are these professors and what are they likely to say to support traumatized students? The law school’s website answers »

Does history ever repeat itself? Perhaps not, but those of us who lived through the 60s and 70s are hearing echoes of those dreadful days. Headlines like this one are a blast from the past: “Police use tear gas on Berkeley protesters.” Our younger readers might not realize what a major role the riots and violent protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s played in the temporary eclipse of »

Columbia Law School is permitting students claiming to be impaired due to the emotional impact of recent non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner matters to postpone taking their final exams. Here is the text of a message from interim dean Robert Scott to the law school community: The grand juries’ determinations to return non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have shaken the faith of some »

A Staten Island grand jury has declined to indict the white police officer who killed a black suspect who resisted arrest. The evidence before the grand jury has not been released; hopefully, it will be. But the entire scene was captured on video, and the video is disturbing. Let’s first recognize that this case bears little resemblance to Michael Brown’s. Brown robbed a convenience store and committed assault in the »